György Kurtág’s works for string quartet may fit comfortably on a single CD, but they define almost his entire composing career. The score he now acknowledges as his Op 1 was the String Quartet No 1, completed in 1959. In it, Kurtág first displayed what he had learned in Paris from his intensive study of Anton Webern, and effectively laid out the template for so much of the music that has followed: a succession of pieces in which, as in Webern, conciseness is everything, with each gesture reduced to its essence, and expressive worlds conjured in a single, spare phrase.
After the First Quartet, though, Kurtág did not return to the medium for almost 20 years, until the 12 “microludes”, Hommage à Mihály András, appeared in 1978. After that, it was another decade until the next and what is perhaps the finest, most intense of all his quartets to date: Officium Breve in Memoriam Andreae Szervánsky, a sequence of 15 microscopic pieces woven around music by Szervánsky himself and a canon from Webern’s Cantata No 2. Further memorials to friends followed, before the six Moments Musicaux of 2005, composed as a test piece for a string quartet competition, and finally another tribute, the Arioso, “in the style of Alban Berg” that Kurtág composed in 2009 for the 85th birthday of Walter Levin, founder of the great LaSalle Quartet.
This disc makes a slender and massively significant collection – 43 pieces, the longest of which lasts barely four minutes; most are considerably shorter. Though groups such as the Keller and Arditti quartets have extensively recorded these pieces, there appears to have been just one complete survey of Kurtág’s quartets before – by the Athena Quartet on a Neos disc released five years ago – but now not easily obtainable, in the UK at least. That gives the Montreal-based Quatuor Molinari the field to themselves, and in general they make the most of it. Technically, their playing is superb, though just occasionally a little bit more subtlety might have worked wonders. They can be rather forthright and insistent, sometimes almost relentless, but they never leave any doubt about the seriousness and profundity of this music, nor about its intrinsic greatness.
